Starfall (5 page)

“Do you think Nadine hooked up with herself again after the dirty deed?” Caleb asks. “Or do you think she's been avoiding all her texts?”

Seconds later out bursts his trademark high-pitched laughter, and soon we all join in, our laughter so loud that we attract even more attention. What does it matter? There's no way that they can know what we're laughing about; there's no way that they can know we've stumbled upon another possible truth that defies explanation. Because if I can turn into a werewolf and Luba can draw upon Orion for her unnatural powers, why can't Nadine get pregnant on her own without having sex? And even if the concept of an indecent conception doesn't entirely compute, it at least allows me to have a few worry-free hours hanging out with my friends.

Until I get home and have to face Louis.

“Gallegos woke up.”

This news should thrill me; it should relieve me of the guilt I've been feeling these past few days, but there's something in Louis's expression that gives me pause. He has more to say.

“He's going to be fine,” he adds.

That can't be all. Louis looks the way my father used to, when right behind his words lay the truth, but it was a truth he didn't fully understand. Barnaby senses it too. I watch my brother from across the kitchen table, waiting for him to swallow his food, because I've learned that my brother's natural tendency is not to hide, so I know he's going to ask the question I'm dying to ask.

“What's wrong, Louis?”

Turning his back to us to wash his hands at the kitchen sink, Louis shakes his head and mumbles an almost incoherent
nothing.
We know he's lying, but Arla and I are too afraid to push him any further. Barnaby isn't.

“Then why do you look like Gallegos died instead of woke up from his coma?”

Louis takes his time. He turns off the water faucet, pulls the kitchen towel from its magnetic ring on the refrigerator door, wipes his hands dry, and then slowly folds the towel and puts it back in its holding place. Deliberate actions that no one interrupts because we all know Louis is searching for the best words to answer Barnaby's question. And those words appear to be foreign to him.

“Because he woke up afraid,” Louis finally says.

I feel my chest heave, and I put my hand up to my mouth for no other reason than to quiet the sound of my breathing.

“What do you mean he woke up afraid?” Barnaby asks. “That doesn't make sense.”

It does if you know the last thing he saw before he passed out and slipped into unconsciousness, the eyes of a girl on the face of a wolf.

“I know, Barn. It really doesn't,” Louis replies, grabbing a plate from the cabinet above the sink and sitting down at the table. “Some disorientation I can understand, but not fear. He's trained for hand-to-hand combat and dangerous situations. He's a cop after all, and I don't know why he isn't acting like one.”

The snarktastic teenager in me wants to say, “That's ironic, Louis, since it took my father's death to make you start acting like a cop.” But the inquisitive wolf inside of me wins out.

“Has he said anything?” I ask. “Has he explained why he's so afraid?”

Shoveling a huge chunk of leftover meatloaf into his mouth, Louis half-chews and half-swallows the meat. A wolf-memory is triggered, and a sea of saliva rises up like waves against my teeth. In my mind's eye I see the saliva dripping from my lips and over my chin to hang in the air, and I drink almost the whole glass of my iced tea before I transform into an unsightly mess right here at the table. It almost prevents me from seeing that Louis is trying desperately to avoid my question.

“Daddy,” Arla says. “What did Gallegos say?”

Resting his forehead in the palm of his left hand, Louis repeats Gallegos's words without looking at us. “He said he was afraid of the eyes.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Arla prods.

Louis looks at Arla, and it's clear that he doesn't want to share this information, but it's burdensome and making him weary. He needs to lighten his load by letting some of it roll off his tongue. “He said the eyes didn't look like they belonged to an animal,” he relays. “He said they looked like they were the eyes of a girl.”

Louis shrugs his shoulders and then exhales loudly with his lips shut tight; he has nothing more to say. When he leaves the table I finally look over to my brother and see that he's rereading the cover of the
Three W
. He pores over the headline one last time before he lifts his head and stares directly into my eyes.

Maybe I should've killed Barnaby when Jess told me to.

I know that's a terrible thought, and I would never do it—I couldn't do it when I was instructed to—but that's all I've been thinking about since I caught him staring at me. My brother knows that I was with Jess the night that she was killed, the night the so-called Full Moon Killer first appeared, and he's always suspected that I know more than what my father told him about what happened that night and what I admitted to. Now that the
W
word and this news about Gallegos is spreading through town like rats running from a flood, maybe it's triggered something; maybe he's remembering things he didn't know he knew. Who knows, maybe Luba's filled him in on the parts of the curstory that I never want him to learn.

“That's a lot of maybes.”

My bedroom suddenly resembles the inside of a honey jar. It's been a while since I've had such a beautiful view, so I let the golden sunshine seep into my pores and warm me from the inside out. It floats through me like sundrenched blood until I feel as if my entire body is glowing from within, like the little piece of Jess that I carry inside of me suddenly exploded. Along with my anger.

“Well, it's about time you showed up!” I yell.

Ignoring my outburst, but not my statement, Jess replies, “I've been put on a short leash these days.”

Ignoring her excuse, I keep yelling. “Like you ever listen to what Mr. Dice has to say.”

“Respect, Dominysan,” she says. “The man you call Mr. Dice is my mentor, my Sarutahiko, and he is in control of my free will.”

Sometimes even I have trouble speaking supernatural.

“Free will is immune to outside forces,” I explain. “That's why it's called free.”

“For mortals perhaps,” she states. “But not Omikami.”

I peer deeper into the sunlight, and I see the change. Instead of hanging horizontally in the air or floating in her favorite yoga position, Jess is sitting at my desk looking at her reflection in the mirror. But before, when she would inspect her face in the mirror while she was alive, she'd look unhappy or frustrated or as if she were searching for a way to fix things; now she looks as if she's staring at a stranger. As if the girl in the mirror is a recurring character in a dream she had when she was very young, and she's trying to recall it.

“Jess,” I say. “What's wrong?”

It takes her a few moments before she can move; she doesn't want to lose the connection to the girl staring back at her. Or the one that she's now facing.

“I'm sorry, Dom,” Jess says softly.

“For what?” I reply, even though I know exactly what she's talking about. She's sorry for abandoning me lately; she's sorry for leaving me on my own instead of coming to help me when I called out for her, when she should've known that I needed her help. She's sorry for not being a real friend. When she speaks, I realize that I'm completely off base.

“For telling you to kill Barnaby.”

Oh, that.

“I got a little too Omicocky and allowed myself to be tricked,” she says. “By Nadine.”

I don't know why, but I grab hold of Jess's hand. I'm not sure if I need to touch her or if I need to reassure her that I don't blame her for what she said or what she told me to do. I didn't act on it; there was no way I could. Barnaby wasn't hurt in any way; he was never really in any danger, so there's nothing to be sorry about. Jess sees it differently.

“Saruta . . . Mister Dice warned me to be careful,” she shares. “But I didn't listen. I didn't think I had to listen to anyone.”

Be careful of Nadine? Why would Jess have to be careful of Nadine?

Like water rippling through my fingers, Jess lets go of my hand; she's gone before I can squeeze tighter to make her stay. Fondly, she holds the Hello Kitty stuffed animal lying on my bed, cradling it as if it were a newborn. She rocks it slowly from side to side, and it's almost as if I can see Jess's youth and humanness spill out of her with every movement.

“Because when I'm with you or when I'm near Nadine, whenever I'm here on earth, really, I'm Jess,” my friend tells me. “But that's not who I am anymore.”

Wrong! I search my brain for the pieces of Japanese vocabulary Jess forced me to learn so I can speak to her in her favorite language. What's the Japanese word for wrong?
“Machigatta!”

Jess smiles, wistfully, but not as my friend, more like an adult amused by the naïveté of a child. She's sitting right next to me, and yet she feels so far away.

“I'm an Amaterasu Omikami; you know that,” she says. “Jess is who I used to be.”

Jess is who you will always be! For some reason those words get caught in my throat, and I remain silent.

“The time is coming, Dom,” Jess says.

No! Something is not coming! I was wrong, everything is staying exactly the same.

“The time is coming for me to fully embrace this new person I've become,” Jess states.

Instantly my mind and my heart do battle; they're engaged in warfare because even though my mind understands what Jess is saying, understands its implications, my heart refuses to accept the meaning of these words. Not yet. Please not just yet! I need to shift the conversation back to something other than Jess and me; someone else needs to take center stage. “What does any of this have to do with Nadine?”

Clutching Hello Kitty in front of her, her arms wrapped around her protectively, Jess looks directly at me. When she speaks she sounds eerie, almost robotic, as if she's struggling to maintain her own voice, her own personality.

“Nadine tricked me into thinking that she was going to use Barnaby to father her child,” she says. “And because I was listening to her thoughts and watching her actions as Jess, I wasn't looking beyond the surface, so I didn't see her true motive.”

I'm almost afraid to ask. “Which was?”

“To wrongfully convince me that Barnaby would help her create evil, knowing that I'd urge you to kill your brother.” The words slide out of Jess's mouth like rain, effortless and comforting and natural, as if they should somehow help me, as if they should somehow ease the pain I went through and still go through whenever I think that I could've ended my brother's life had I grown weak, had I given in and followed Jess's obscene instruction. The words that gush out of my mouth are like an angry flood.

“That's supposed to make it all better, Jess?!” I scream. “You were
tricked,
so you ordered me to kill my brother without really thinking it through?!”

“I know it's hard for you to understand because no matter how much you've changed, Dom, you're still the same girl you always were,” she says. “I'm not.”

“I know you're not, Jess, and I know that I'm responsible for that!” I shout. “But Barnaby could be dead because of you!”

I'm so angry with Jess that I miss the most important part of this revelation: that Barnaby is definitely not the father of Nadine's baby.

“Wait a second. . . .” I start.

Smiling genuinely for the first time since she's arrived, Jess says, “With all your wolf-smarts, you're still always a few beats behind.”

“So he isn't?”

“No,” she replies.

“Is there a father?” I ask.

Her smile turns into uproarious laughter. “Of course there's a father, Dominysan!” Jess squeals. “Are you so caught up with the bee and the butterfly that you've forgotten all about the birds and the bees?”

Through my own gigglaughs I explain the revelation of the moon jellyfish's unique ability and our thought that maybe Nadine's baby is biologically fatherless. Jess is amused, but her opinion isn't swayed.

“That would have made a clever coincidence,” Jess admits. “But it's wrong. Some coincidences are really just that, Dom, fun and interesting but completely devoid of any truth.”

“How can you tell the difference?” I ask.

“Sometimes you're not meant to know the difference,” Jess replies cryptically. Then with a mischievous gleam in her eye she adds, “How else would the supernatural powers that be laugh at your mistakes?”

We really are just laughter for the gods.

Anticipating my next question, she continues talking before I can even open my mouth. “And I cannot tell you who the baby's father is.”

“Limitations?” I ask.

Another wistful smile and another change. Jess looks exactly the same as she always has, since the day she died, a fifteen-year-old girl, not a child and not a woman, stuck in that frustrating in-between world. But now she appears to be older. She looks as if she's outgrowing her shell, as if the outside and the inside are no longer a match. The more I contemplate what this could mean, the more frightened I start to get.

Suddenly Jess spins around, and strips of golden light encircle her body with each turn, like she's one of those rhythmic gymnasts who jump and twirl and flip around while carrying a wand with a long ribbon on the end of it. It's a gold-medal performance, but it's all for my benefit; Jess isn't feeling any of the joy she's creating.

“So then why are you here?” I ask. My voice makes her come to an abrupt stop, but her golden light continues to wrap itself around her unmoving body for a few seconds longer until it fades away and disappears into the air. “Did you come to crash the party?”

“What party?”

Now I know something's wrong. In less than an hour our house is going to be filled with our friends for Caleb's going-off-to-college party, his final blast before heading off to Big Red, the University of Nebraska. It's one shindig I know Jess wouldn't want to miss.

“You know exactly what I'm talking about!” I protest. “Caleb's party! Don't try to act as if you're not interested.”

But Jess isn't acting; she really isn't interested.

“I think I've outgrown my party-girl phase,” Jess replies.

I sit in my desk chair. It's still warm with Jess's golden light, and I realize Jess isn't any type of girl at all anymore. “Then . . . why did Dice let you off your leash to come here?”

“I have to warn you,” she says, standing in front of me, but once again she's more interested in her reflection than my response.

“About what?” I demand. “And before you say anything, make sure that what you're going to tell me is accurate; no more misguided commands to kill.”

“Something's coming,” she says firmly.

I don't question her further, not because I know there's little more that she can tell me, but because I've sensed the same thing for weeks now, since my last transformation. I've tried to ignore it, but it's always been there, in the back of my head, right behind my eyes. Not a feeling, more like an expectation.

“Something's coming, Dominy, that will change everything,” Jess states. “And you need to be prepared.”

The message isn't as scary as the tone of Jess's voice, which is abrupt and distant and final. Who is this person standing in front of me? I have no idea who she is! Before I get any more answers, Jess disappears, taking all of her warm, golden sunshine with her.

Just as the last flecks of gold leave my bedroom, I hear her call out to me.

“Enjoy the party!”

 

It takes me a little over an hour to feel relaxed enough so I can fulfill Jess's wish and actually feel any enjoyment. But when I catch my reflection in the mirror that joy is tested. Just like Jess, I feel as if I'm confronting a stranger.

The young woman staring back at me looks intriguing, like someone I've met, but whom I don't fully know yet. She's a curious creature. I'm not embarrassed to admit that I find it strange that someone who is cursed could look so beautiful.

My hair is fuller and thicker and curlier than ever before, with a definite wild-like quality. Sometimes it's hard to manage, so when that happens, like tonight, I let it fall freely. Right now it hangs several inches below my shoulders, and since it's freshly washed it blooms with the smell of honeysuckle.

From the neck down there's been a change as well. All remnants of the little girl I once was are gone; in their place are naturally sculpted curves that I know are perfectly proportioned because Caleb can't take his eyes off of me lately.

The only parts of my body that give me hesitation, that I'm ambivalent about are my eyes. I love their shape, more oval than round, and especially their color, because my mother shares the same blue-gray. But now that Gallegos has risen from his coma proclaiming that he's being haunted by a pair of eyes that belong to a girl instead of a wolf, some of their beauty has been tainted. I know it's a long shot, and I know that most people don't take Gallegos seriously, but I'm worried that if he sees me he'll make the connection.

Luckily I have another, more important connection to occupy my thoughts.

“Is this seat taken?” Caleb whispers in my ear, while placing his hand on my butt. It's a crude comment, but it also makes me feel sexified, so I let him get away with it.

“Sounds like somebody's rethinking his decision to move away to college,” I say, after Caleb takes a pause from kissing me.

“You know I'm gonna miss you like crazy,” he replies, his fingers interlocking and resting on the base of my back.

“I'm gonna miss you too.” I sigh. “But we, um, still have a few more hours left before you leave.”

Smiling impishly, Caleb tries to read my thoughts, but I detect doubt along with the passion in his smile, so I press my body against him even harder. Instantly, he understands the meaning of my words and my gesture. There's no need to speak, so I kiss him deeply and feel his hard muscles flex underneath his T-shirt as his hands go in search of other parts of my body. I've thought about it thoroughly, I've talked about it with Arla incessantly, and I've decided that I'm ready to give myself to him, and I want him to know that. I want Caleb to be my first, and I know that he feels the same way. It may be a bit inappropriate, however, to let our body language announce our true feelings to everyone else in the room.